If this doesn't make you a Marxist, I don't know what will. Remember those vague reports about a sturdy young Rumsfeld visiting Iraq in the mid-eighties? I guess he was just there to pimp for Bechtel -- my favorite Bay-area imperialist oil cartel. From what we can see in newly released documents (from a source in the State department perhaps??) acquired by the Institute for Policy Studies with the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network, it seems that Rummy went to talk to Hussein about getting an oil pipeline through Jordan. This was right when that nasty Hussy (is that what I should call him?)was gassing Iranians with "Chemical Ali."

Rummy offered to sweeten the deal with dual-use chemical weapons technology from, yes, Bechtel. Hussein turned him down, though, because he thought the US was dicking him over with absurdly high construction costs -- that and he worried about getting attacked by Israel. Rumsfeld took off. Then he got ready to plot the overthrow of Saddam with his friends at the American Enterprise Institute -- which, as it happens, is financed by the philantrophic wing of Bechtel, the Bechtel Foundation!!!

I must say, these are some pretty sweet documents. Everything from internal business memos to correspondance between the Premier of Israel to highly-placed Reagan administration officials like Edwin Meese, a contemporary of Rummy. Here's the big pdf overview by SEEN and IPS.

My favorite passage from the report, authored by Jim Vallette, is basically a complete repudiation of the "get rid of weapons" and "liberate Iraq" claims by the Bush administration:

The men who courted Saddam while he gassed Iranians are now waging war against him, ostensibly because he holds these same weapons of mass destruction" said Jim Vallette, lead author of the report. "To a man, they now deny that oil has anything to do with the conflict. Yet during the Reagan Administration, and in the years leading up to the present conflict, these men shaped and implemented a strategy that has everything to do with securing Iraqi oil exports. All of this documentation suggests that Reagan Administration officials bent many rules to convince Saddam Hussein to open up a pipeline of central interest to the US, from Iraq to Jordan

Then Vallette's clincher: In their own words, we now see that for Administration officials, a dictator is a friend of the United States when he is willing to make an oily deal, and a mortal enemy when he is not